Born into a family practicing bhakti yoga, Ramya was given the name Vrishni. From the very beginning of her life, she was exposed to Indian Vedic culture. Chanting mantras and reading the Vedas always was a daily activity for her. From the age of 5 she learned her first bhajans (devotional sacred songs from India). She would sing with all of her love.
“Having Indian heritage from my mother’s side seems to enable me to capture the essence of the culture, feel the music with my soul and sing the songs with all of my love,” she says. “Singing these songs connects me to the Divine couple Radha and Krishna.”
At three years old, Ramya learned how to play kartals (hand cymbals) and when she turned eight, she learned how to play the mridanga (drum) and how to lead kirtan. She also learned and performed classical Indian dance called Kathak, which represents a storyteller who recounted Lord Krishna’s pastimes in the temples and danced them in a state of ecstasy.
On her second trip to India in Fall 2000, Ramya lived in Vrindavan for four months, and took classes from a local music teacher. Every afternoon, she would spend hours in front of her altar singing from whatever new bhajan book had been presented to her that day. When she came across a song she did not know, she would read the translation and get inspired by the meaning. A melody would then manifest. It was the beginning of her first album Beloved of Krishna.
“One evening,” she says, “I was meditating on the bhajan ‘Radhika Stava’ and started to hum a new melody, then began to sing it out loud while riding on a rickshaw all the way to my destination and also on my way back, making sure I recorded it in my brain.”
Ramya’s music embodies a sincerity that transforms simple chanting and singing of Sanskrit words into a spiritual voyage.
The energy of Beloved of Krishna, with its ethnic beats and rhythmic clapping, is the essence of kirtan. Kirtan is generally an interactive perfomance art. It is most often sung live, with the “audience” contributing in call and response. Beloved of Krishna is a ticket to the remote villages of India, where devotional music is more than folk songs chanted by those who have known them all of their lives. It is an atmosphere, a circle of lifetime friends–a sacred but tangible place.
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